About 5,500 years later, shoe steps into the light

It’s the oldest piece of leather footwear ever

What is believed to be the world’s oldest leather shoe has been discovered in a cave in Armenia. The cowhide shoe dates from around 3,500 BC and is the equivalent of a women’s size 7.
(Boris Gasparian/ Institute of Archaeology and Ethnography)

E-mail this article

Sending your article

Your article has been sent.

WASHINGTON — About 5,500 years ago someone in the mountains of Armenia put his best foot forward in what is now the oldest leather shoe ever found.

It will never be confused with a penny loafer or a track shoe, but the well-preserved footwear was made of a single piece of leather, laced up the front and back, researchers reported yesterday in PLoS ONE, a journal of the Public Library of Science.

Worn and shaped by the wearer’s right foot, the shoe was found in a cave along with other evidence of human occupation. The shoe had been stuffed with grass, dating to the same time as the leather of the shoe — between 5,637 and 5,387 years ago.

“This is great luck,’’ enthused archeologist Ron Pinhasi of University College Cork in Ireland, who led the research team.

“We normally only find broken pots, but we have very little information about the day-to-day activity’’ of these ancient people, he said. “What did they eat? What did they do? What did they wear? This is a chance to see this . . . It gives us a real glimpse into society.’’

Previously the oldest leather shoe discovered in Europe or Asia was on the famous Otzi, the “iceman’’ found frozen in the Alps a few years ago and now preserved in Italy. Otzi has been dated to between 5,375 and 5,128 years ago, a few hundred years more recent than the Armenian shoe.

Otzi’s shoes were made of deer and bear leather held together by a leather strap. The Armenian shoe appears to be made of cowhide, Pinhasi said. Older sandals have been found in a cave in Missouri, but those were made of fiber rather than leather.

The shoe found in what is now Armenia was discovered in a pit, along with a broken pot and some goat horns.

But Pinhasi doesn’t think it was thrown away. There was discarded material that had been tossed outside the cave, while this pit was inside in the living area. And while the shoe had been worn, it wasn’t worn out.

The Armenian shoe was small by current standards — US women’s size 7 — but might have fit a man of that era, Pinhasi said.

He described the shoe as a single piece of leather cut to fit the foot. The back of the shoe was closed by a lace passing through four sets of eyelets. In the front, 15 pairs of eyelets were used to lace it from toe to top.

There was no reinforcement in the sole, just the one layer of soft leather. “I don’t know how long it would last in rocky terrain,’’ Pinhasi said.

He noted that the shoe is similar to a type of footwear common in the Aran Islands, west of Ireland, up until the 1950s. The Irish version, known as “pampooties,’’ reportedly didn’t last long, he said.

“In fact, enormous similarities exist between the manufacturing technique and style of this [Armenian] shoe and those found across Europe at later periods, suggesting that this type of shoe was worn for thousands of years across a large and environmentally diverse region,’’ Pinhasi said.